all color categories are made up
and the only ones whose corresponding wavelength ranges are directly detected by our eyes are ~red, ~green, and ~blue
take it from someone who this year failed a color vision test so spectacularly that the doctor asked him ‘so do you just see in black and white?’: let people like things
even fake as fuck shades of color that we KNOW THEY’RE JUST MAKING UP to mess with us
wait what
My father was recently diagnosed with a form of cancer that will probably kill him. For the past few weeks, pretty much the only things I’ve thought about have been my father’s looming death, my virtual estrangement from him, the genocidal siege of Gaza, and the past hundred years or so of the history of Palestine. Needless to say, I couldn’t keep that up. I had to make room for some lightness in my life and in my mind.
The past few days have been a relief.
I’ve reconciled with my father somewhat. He’s still often stressful to be around, especially in his own house, but I feel better equipped to handle and pass over tense moments with him than I’ve ever been in the past. It’s been good visiting him and my mom. I’m only now starting to look forward to going home.
I’m reading fiction again for the first time in a long time. I’d forgotten how easy it is compared to history or political theory; how effortless reading can be when you’re not trying to take notes, when you’re not stopping after nearly every sentence to make sure that you’re paying attention and understand well. What I’ve been ‘reading’ is actually an audiobook. My mom and I have been cozying ourselves up next to a shared Bluetooth speaker, sometimes with a bowl of popcorn or candy like we would for a movie. It’s been a delight! The novel itself has already been thrilling and intriguing for both of us, and we must only be like a third of the way through. (This October, my mom expressed interest in educating herself about what led up to current events, and so she agreed to read three books on the history of Palestine with me. We’re still committed to that, but good God is this novel so much easier!)
I’ve been playing a relaxing, delightful, and sometimes very difficult videogame for at least a couple hours each day. A lot of my attention has gone to music, to the cool weather (which I love), and to the young puppy who moved in here recently (although my own dog, who is visiting along with me, kinda hates him).
It’s good to have a break from all my ruminations, from current events, and from my job. I wish I could have another week off somehow, but this’ll do.
I wonder what CPUSA’s policies and statements/principles were back then, and whether they then held to the ‘internal colony’ line. I don’t know the history well enough to place that, but maybe another comrade browsing does.
What year is that image from?
Let him know that you think those anti-communist materials are wrong or misleading. Offer to explore some of these topics in depth with him in some format(s) that’s agreeable to both of you (video, books, podcasts, whatever). Let him pick some sources, and you pick some sources, and then you both discuss them together.
Most people who are anti-communist are reflexively so, and have simply never heard a lot of key history. Just studying/exploring/discussing communism and its history can undo a lot of that.
As tempting as it might be, you don’t have to go through everything in the propaganda they’ve sent you sentence by sentence and then debunk it. Just have a conversation with them about it and take a look at the real stuff together.
It’s especially weird that they did so rather vaguely. It’s not like they were like ‘fascist figure X was right about historical fact Y in context Z, and here’s why I think that matters’. They just favorably compare fascist ‘geopolitical analysis’ to your blog post, in general. That does seem like more or less just praising fascists to me.
Made curious by some of the other comments here connecting that Redditor’s abusive language and refusal to really say anything of substance beyond ‘I don’t like this’ and Maoism, I just spent kind of a long time looking back through that person’s comments trying to figure out what about their thinking is particularly Maoist, especially in the context of that series of insults they wrote on your post, which don’t, to me, reveal any particular way of thinking so much as a temperament.
I did eventually find some Maoist language across their comments. They probably do self-identify as a Maoist or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, though I didn’t see a comment to that effect.
But what I noticed more was that pretty much their only mode of discussion was verbal combat, and maybe in some cases declarations on certain questions or definitions of terms. There wasn’t a lot I could recognize as instruction, exploration, or listening, although I imagine they’d consider some of their declarations educational.
I’m tired. I can’t think. I don’t have a thesis here. But OP, I’m sorry that someone took it upon themselves to shit on your work instead of offering you feedback or simply saying nothing.
Reaction videos are the lowest form of content imo. Far lazier and far less interesting than speedrunning, coding streams, reading/discussion streams, etc. (Not that I find Twitch streams generally compelling, either.)
And payments to streamers aren’t donations in the sense of charity and don’t claim to be. They’re tips paid to entertainers, like money tossed into the hat of a street musician. It’s a different model than wage work but it’s not like a scam or a trick or something.
Using those tips to employ the wage labor of others (e.g., video editors) is exploitation, though.
The upvote/downvote numbers on platforms like this can be a powerful temptation to vanity, and addictive.
You have the right idea. Go spend time with people who love you.
Last week someone here called me a ‘fucking worm’ (repeatedly) and a ‘little baby’, and told me I should be ‘erased from existence’, along with a pile of other insults. (Someone else reported and the mods banned them, in addition to deleting the worst of their comments. Thank you.) That outburst was in response to me trying to voice what is, imo, another aspect of this same exact problem. That experience naturally got me thinking even more about this pattern, and my own relationship to it.
I’ve been cruel and domineering online before, especially in my late teens and early twenties. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out how to be critical and steadfast in my criticism without ever being vicious.
Finding one’s way to communism means, among other things, becoming more intimately aware of horrible, painful facts about imperialism past and present. There’s also a real sense of alienation that comes with rejecting the dominant ideologies in one’s own culture and society. I think that unfortunately often, among young men especially, ‘conversion’ to socialism does less to challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to violence and domination than to direct those attitudes to new targets.
It’s perhaps an especially difficult thing when learning the real history of socialist revolutions involves coming to understand that revolutionary violence can be truly necessary, that ‘terrorism’ is a label that has been weaponized against righteous and successful liberation struggles, that failure to suppress counterrevolution has historically meant defeat at the hands of brutal, brutal, reaction, and so on.
Emphasis on the material as a historical force, as something which generates ideology as a kind of rationalization, can also be misused to downplay or turn away from the role of the subjective. If one is already so inclined, it is easy to dismiss any call to introspection as idealism— especially when one sees radlibs make such calls in bad faith and treat them as the limit of politics.
The road to socialist understanding for men and boys raised under patriarchy is riddled with pitfalls. The distance and abstractness of online interaction don’t help here, either.
My guy, you just absolutely exploded into a vicious, personal attack in response to a reminder of some basic elements of male socialization under patriarchy and a suggestion that they might play into war voyeurism.
You just responded to a report that you failed to connect with a certain emotional dimension of a post in a comradeship community with an attempt to dominate and punish, via verbal abuse, the person who pointed that out.
I genuinely think there is something wrong with you if it doesn’t inspire you.
Jumping onto a post about the immense heaviness of reckoning with the human toll of this bombing campaign in Gaza and the discounting, detached way it is discussed in the media with what amounts to
What do you mean? We get to watch spectacular violence like the ground war, isn’t that enlivening?
is an empathy failure.
I’ve seen some footage like what you’ve linked. It’s true that the courage of the resistance fighters in Gaza is remarkable and inspiring, and that this courage stands in contrast to the hesitancy of the IDF to even set foot on the ground they purport to invade.
But does that really so uplift the totality of these events that it makes them somehow a pleasure to follow? And are clips like that really very informative about that totality? I think one can only answer ‘yes’ to those questions if one is selectively detached from certain facts as well as feelings.
If anger is easier to access than grief, why? If it’s easier to focus on the ground war than the siege, why? If justified violence is easier to witness or contemplate than suffering, why?
For someone fighting on the ground, the fight itself is the answer to those questions. But for you and me?
It’s almost like we were taught as little boys that violence and anger are our purview, but grief and care are not; that to countenance sadness is to approach defeat.
I had to cut way, way back in the past week or so on all such media consumption. Even without the infuriating and callous ‘analysis’ of mainstream Western commentators, the raw facts are too painful for me to be in constant contact with them and still function.
Obviously I’m still following things, and still trying to educate myself and others. But I’ve got to limit my exposure to content, especially to video, of constant updates of ongoing events or I’ll just completely hyperfixate and shrivel up. Emotionally, it’s too much.
We had a post yesterday where someone posted a comment as bait, then made a post about how awful Lemmygrad is for upvoting it.
Missed this. Link?
Instead of mainstream social media, I’ve been directing the energy that ongoing events in Palestine stirs up in me into educating myself on related topics, and just engaging the topic in conversations with the people closest to me. Similarly, when I feel too tense or riled up about news coverage and commentary, I focus on long-form content not directly concerning the current bombing campaign, like history books or YouTube lectures.
What I probably need to do more of generally is just disengage altogether, but overall I do feel like it serves my mental health better when I avoid the punditry in favor of more substantial content.
Anyway I think that advocacy is important and valuable, but I think it’s absolutely your prerogative to limit that or pursue that in a way that supports your overall mental health.
And it’s not just you. Mainstream discourse on the ongoing slaughter of Gaza, and indeed the whole Palestinian struggle and situation, is fucking exhausting and infuriating here in the imperial core. And the facts of what’s happening, even aside from the way the situation is discussed, are just plain heavy and painful.
Too many things at once! Right now:
Plus a couple works of fiction, one sort of autobiographical piece, and some computer programming textbooks.
the earth is HEALING